AMD takes to the sky, teases Radeon HD 7990

AMD’s GDC presentations focused on console wins, cloud gaming, and the upcoming Radeon 7990. The PS4, Wii U, and Xbox 720 all got explicit mentions. The company also announced its new Radeon Sky cards — GCN-based GPUs that are “cloud-optimized.”

Team Red also announced a partnership with CiiNow, a cloud gaming infrastructure provider. Its nascent partner is convinced that cloud gaming is the future (obviously) and that it can offer a superior experience to Gaikai or OnLive. The company offered an interesting breakdown of precisely where latency is added to game streaming, including a downright odd claim that it was actually faster to stream FEAR 3 than to play it on the Xbox 360.

*Citation Needed on that FEAR 3 claim

Despite all the drum-banging, we remain dubious of cloud gaming’s long-term potential. As a consumer, the last thing I’m interested in doing is signing up for 2-3 services in order to play the games I want to access (the chances of every game coming to a single service is infinitesimal).

The problem with latency is that it’s definitionally variable. AMD and Nvidia tease the idea of streaming high-end PC graphics to tablets and smartphones, but ignore how brittle internet service can be. Actual performance depends on the time of day, whether anyone else is using the router in your home, how they’re using it, the type of internet service you have, the general quality of the lines and equipment used to deliver it to you, and whether Mercury is in retrograde.

AMD’s big unveil (and worst-kept secret) was the Radeon 7990. Manufacturers like PowerColor and Asus have actually been shipping Radeon 7990s for over a year, but these cards weren’t sanctioned by AMD. Once the S10000 showed up (that’s AMD’s dual-GPU virtualization solution), it was only a matter of time before the company built a consumer version of the card.

Close-up examination of the 7990 comes courtesy of Anandtech. This concludes that AMD’s official flavor is different from the current unofficial versions in at least one respect — it uses two eight-pin connectors with a maximum power draw of 375W rather than the 500W+ and three eight-pin connectors on some of the other cards.

Whether or not this will impact overall performance is unclear; the PowerColor and Asus cards are both designed for overclocking and are likely tuned with substantial margins of error where power consumption is concerned. The S10000, however, only offers 1792 GPU cores rather than the full 2048 that vendor versions of the HD 7990 have shipped with. Honestly, it’s a bit surprising that AMD is shipping a dual GPU this late in the HD 7000 family’s life cycle. It’s likely a belated response to the GTX Titan from Nvidia and an attempt to polish the Graphics Core Next family through the end of the year.

AMD’s public disclosures were very short on details concerning whatever graphics core it is that will replace GCN in late 2013 or early 2014; the company hasn’t released an updated HSA roadmap slide in over a year and GCN 2.0 architectural details are nearly nonexistent.

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I really hope Intel release a high end version of Haswell without the crappy onboard graphics, I really resent paying for that.

AMD – cloud gaming? Seriously? I can’t see that taking off – having to constantly stream HD video and put up with latency even on single player games.

The 7990 looks nice, although it’d be good to see some benchmarks.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1223563048 Angel Ham

Talking about graphics.. Did you guys retouched the looks on the site? Something’s a bit off but I can’t tell because the changes feel like a mix of subtlety and pancake makeup.

ee mail

Cloud Gaming
———————
I think thats the future. I remember playing The Elder Scrolls , came back from work played TES at night upto 11 clock and during day time I wished I could continue playing it on laptop or on smartphone while travelling or in idle moments. Even at home I wished I could play it on my 3D TV w/o connecting to PC.
Thats where cloud gaming fits it. Let the GPU companies keep their hardware, let them build GPU server farms with thousands or millions of GPUs and then offer the gaming service just like video channel over the internet and also on TV channels as interactive service.
(1) Interactive TVs – It should work just like a TV channel but with internet connected , lets say I select the (future) gaming channel. then it should show a menu / array of games which it offers . Using smart TV gestures I would select a game . The internet connected smart TV then signal the AMD / Nvidia / Intel / whatever, gaming server farm to play the game . Using gesture then I would start playing the game as with kinect. The smart TV would only display the images, like videos, sent from the GPU server farm with absolutely no GPU processing. 3D option should be there SBS etc.
(2) Laptop/ tablet / smartphone/ vuzix headgear – same process , all we would require is connectivity and game will be shown only as video streams formatted for the device resolution & frame rates & 3D options. The idea is to continue playing the game even on the move, any time, anywhere gaming with same good quality.
Now , since the game is processed at the server end in the cloud , the service providers will have absolute control and people will only pay subscription rates. 1$ per day per device is a good option . A revenue of 1 million $ per day would mean 365 million $ per annum or 1 Billion $ / annum @ 3$ / day.

This would be exciting both for vendors as well as for users.

sdfsdfsd sdfsdkklfsd

$1/day is expensive. That’s $365/year – wait 2 years and I can BUY (not rent) a PC that would likely blow the GPU clusters you speak of out of the water (in terms of what 1 user would get) – and it would be mine, I would NOT be renting it from a company.

ee mail

I have forgotten how many graphic cards & CPU I have thrown away as junk garbage. Of course yes it needs high internet connectivity but thats improving day by day. I said $1 /day so that I can play whenever I want. A person is not supposed to play all the time . I like to play ,say once in three days, which becomes say 10$/month which is affordable and ok for a new service , with time , competition & popularity the price would come down naturally.

Ramtha604

Having played Quakeworld and Quake 2 competitively during their time over the internet as well as in LAN I know what a latency of 100 or 120 ms feels like and in a word: it’s terrible. The CiiNow graphic claims that FEAR 3 played on a local Xbox 360 shows the consequences of the players inputs on the screen with a delay of 120 ms. Did they use a broken Xbox 360? Because if that was normal the game would have gotten rated as practically unplayable by 99% of the players and reviewers anywhere and that wasn’t the case.

Alternatively they maybe used the one scene (if there was such a scene) in the game where the framerate drops to ~9 fps for half a second on the Xbox360 and used this to come to their desired results?

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